2022 Commissioning Giants gain ground

Commissioning Giants insights

• The 2022 Commissioning Giants earned $79 million more than last year, though the percentage of total gross revenue earned for commissioning projects decreased slightly.
• Notable changes include a jump in data center commissioning from 27% to 40%; COVID-19 concerns dropped by half.
• Review the 2022 MEP Giants for additional data about these firms.

The 2022 Commissioning Giants provides information on the top 25 firms based on self-reporting for this year’s rankings.

The average percentage of commissioning revenue earned by the 2022 Commissioning Giants was approximately 30.5%, a decrease from the past reporting year at 33% of gross revenue. The top 25 firms earn a great deal of their revenue from commissioning, with four firms earning 100% of their revenue solely from commissioning: Bureau Veritas Primary Integration Inc., Iconicx Critical Solutions, Rubicon Technical Services and FST-HEA LLC.

See Table 1 for the complete ranking, including the four new or unranked companies.

Table 1: The top 25 firms earned $730 million in the past fiscal year. Nearly all firms (96%) reported having a commissioning engineer or coordinator on staff and 92% indicated they had a business development director. Courtesy: Consulting-Specifying Engineer

For the 2022 report, the top 25 companies made $730 million in commissioning revenue, a marked increase from the previous year’s $651 million. The majority (44%) of firms are consulting-engineering firms with a commissioning division; about a quarter (24%) are commissioning-focused firms. Firm ownership type fell into four categories: public (32%), private (24%), employee-owned (24%) and limited liability company (20%).

The average commissioning fee per project varied. Forty percent of companies earned $100,001 to $300,000, 28% earned $50,001 to $100,000 and 20% earned $25,001 to $50,000. Only 8% earned more than $300,000 per project.

This data reflects commissioning at all levels: new buildings (47%), whole building (9%), emergency power systems (9%), existing buildings (7%), retro-commissioning (9%), building enclosure (envelope, 5%), monitoring-based (5%), fire protection systems (3%), recommissioning (3%) and communications systems (3%). Each reporting firm completed, on average, 320 projects in the previous reporting year, up from 282 commissioning projects (at any level) in 2021.

The average percentage of commissioning revenue earned by these firms fell into a few key building types:

• Data centers: 40%, a large jump from 27%.
• Hospitals/health care facilities: 14%.
• Government or military facilities: 12%.
• Office buildings: 12%.

According to survey respondents, these firms were contracted to complete commissioning for a variety of reasons: resiliency (safety, flexibility, disaster resilience, health: 88%, a jump from 76%), savings (energy efficiency, lower life cycle cost: 84%), sustainability (long-term materials and performance efficiency: 84%) and mandates (codes, standards, benchmarking: 76%, a marked decrease from first-place 92% in the previous reporting year). Other reasons included and marketability of the property (64%, a decrease from 72%).

Commissioning challenges

The 2022 Commissioning Giants study asked about future challenges in commissioning. They are:

• Not enough commissioning authorities or agents (CxA) or commissioning professionals (CxP): 64%
• Lack of knowledge about commissioning’s worth: 56%
• Lack of funding or buy-in (from owners, engineers, etc.) to conduct commissioning: 52%
• Codes, standards changing: 16%
• Slow market acceptance: 16%
• Association leadership lacking or too slow: 8%
• Litigation concerns: 8%
• Poor training opportunities: 8%
• Other: 12%

The 2022 Commissioning Giants study asked for information related directly to challenges for these firms. The No. 1 challenge, COVID-19 concerns and issues, dropped to 32% from 64%. The second challenge the economy’s impact on the construction market, dropped to 12% from 16%. Staffing (quality of young commissioning professionals) tied for No. 2 at 12%.

Commissioning firm types

The majority of firms are consulting-engineering firms with a division committed to commissioning at various levels. Courtesy: Consulting-Specifying Engineer

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